Table of Contents
Detailed Instructions for Conducting Searches
1. Enter a Search Term in the Search Bar
3. Narrow Results with Additional Search Terms
6. Enter an Issue Date to Obtain Results in a Date Range
7. View the Application Results
9. Navigate the Application Display Panels
10. Adjust Page Magnification and View
11. Use the Adobe PDF Tool Bar
12. Searching Within the Document
14. New Search
15. Sort Results by Application Number
16. Sort Results by Issue Date
1. Enter Search Term(s) in the Search Bar
2. Enter Date Range if desired
3. Click Search or press Enter
4. View and Sort Search Results if Desired
5. Select and Click on desired Application Number
6. Click on desired page number with highlighted search results
7. Review text and drawings
8. Copy text and paste into word processing document if desired
9. Click Back to Search Results Button
10. Select and Click on another Application Number
Detailed Instructions follow …
Detailed Instructions for Conducting Searches
1. Enter a search term in the Search Bar
The first step is entering a search term in the search bar. For example, if you receive a rejection based on In re Owens, you may want to research how other design patent applicants have handled similar rejections. To search, type “In re Owens” in the search bar, leave the issue date empty, and click Search or return. Note: Since the search term contains more than one word, it should be placed in quotation marks.
2. Review Results
If the database of design patent applications contains the search terms, results will be obtained. In this example, a total of 385 results were obtained. The search terms are highlighted in yellow in the Results Summary.
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3. Narrow Results with Additional Search Terms
Results may be narrowed by entering additional search terms. For example, if your “In re Owens” issue concerns “new matter,” you can modify the search by adding additional search terms. For example, the search “(In re Owens) (new matter)”~30 will return just 22 results.
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Search Methods, including Boolean Operators, Proximity Searches, Fuzzy Searches, Wildcard Searches, and Grouping, are explained in the Search Methods section below.
4. View Items Per Page
The Items per page are shown at the bottom of the Search Results page. The default number is 50, but this can be changed.
To change the number, click on the down arrow and a pop-up box will appear.
Select the Items per page desired. If the applications returned on the search exceed the Items per page, then the arrows to the right may be used to navigate to the additional applications.
5. Search Methods
Conduct searches using single words or multiple words using search operators as follows:
Boolean Operators
AND – Example: patent AND functional will return documents containing both patent and functional.
OR – Example: patent OR functional will return documents containing either patent or functional.
NOT – Example: patent NOT functional will return documents containing patent but not functional.
Proximity Search
Proximity searches find terms that are near each other in a document. Insert a tilde “~” symbol at the end of words in quotation marks followed by the number of words that create the proximity boundary. For example, “patent functional”~10 will find the terms “patent” and “functional” within 10 words of each other in the document. You may also use parenthesis within the quotation marks. For example, “(broken lines) (new matter)”~20 will find the terms “broken lines” and “new matter” within 20 words of each other.
IMPORTANT: Do NOT cut and paste the quotation marks from another source document. Enter the quotation marks from your keyboard or the search may not work correctly.
Fuzzy Search
A fuzzy search finds matches in terms with a similar construction, expanding a term up to the maximum of 50 terms that meet the distance criteria of two or less.
To do a fuzzy search, use the tilde “~” symbol at the end of a single word with an optional parameter, a number between 0 and 2 (default), that specifies the edit distance. For example, “blue~” or “blue~1” would return “blue”, “blues”, and “glue”.
Fuzzy search can only be applied to terms, not phrases, but you can append the tilde to each term individually in a multi-part name or phrase. For example, “Unviersty~ of~ “Wshington~” would match on “University of Washington”.
Wildcard search
You can use generally recognized syntax for multiple (*) character wildcard searches for prefix, infix, and suffix matching. For example, indefini* will return both indefinite and indefiniteness.
Grouping
You can use parentheses to create subqueries, including operators within the parenthetical statement. For example, Maatita AND (drawing OR figure) will search for documents containing the “Maatita” term and either “drawing” or “figure” (or both).
6. Enter an Issue Date to Obtain Results in a Date Range
To obtain results with a certain date range, enter an issue date.
Click on the Issue Date to obtain a drop-down menu.
Note: If nothing is entered in the Issue Date bar, the search results will default to All Time.
Most Recent will provide results from the last date design patent applications entered into the system were issued. Last 30 Days is self-explanatory.
Custom Range provides a pop-up calendar where you can enter a beginning date on first click and an ending date on second click.
7. View the Application Results
Search results are formatted into three columns. The first column is the application number. The second column is the issue date. The application numbers and issue dates can be sorted in ascending or descending order. Sorting is described in the Sorting Results section below.
The third column is the Results Summary. The Results Summary provides a listing of brief excerpts in the application where the search terms are found. The search terms are highlighted in yellow in the Results Summary.
8. View Application Documents
Clicking on the Application Number will bring up a two-panel Application Display. The left panel displays the Application Documents in PDF format. The right panel lists the pages where the highlighted search terms are found in the application documents.
9. Navigate the Application Display Panels
Clicking on a highlighted search term in the right panel will display the portion of the application containing the search term.
The search term and the sentence where the search term is located will be highlighted.
Click on different highlighted search terms in the right panel to display different pages in the application documents.
You may scroll through the application using four different methods. First, click on the application document and use the scroll wheel on your mouse (or fingers on a touch screen). Second, click and drag on the scroll bar to the right of the application document.
Third, click on the left right arrows located on the left side of the ribbon above the PDF Document. Fourth, jump to a page by entering the desired page in the page displayed box and hitting return.
10. Adjust Page Magnification and View
Change the magnification of PDF documents using the tools at the middle of the ribbon above the PDF Document.
11. Use the PDF Tool Bar
The PDF Tool Bar is displayed at the middle right of the ribbon above the Application Document.
Clicking on a tool will activate it.
Note: Added text comments, highlighting, images, and lines will remain with the document if downloaded or printed. They will not remain on the permanent document in the database.
12. Searching Within the Document
Searching within the document may be done in two ways. First, by clicking on the search icon on the left side of the ribbon above the PDF document.
In this case, the term broken line was inserted in the search bar and the term is highlighted wherever it appears in the document. You may set conditions of the search by checking Highlight All, Match Case, Match Diacritics (accented letters), and/or Match Words. The number of matches is displayed on the right side and you may move between highlighted terms using the arrow keys.
The second way to search within a document is to use the document search icon above the Search Results panel. Entering a search term in this Search Bar replaces the original search and provides results in the Search Results panel. For example, the term “Maatita” can replace the terms “In re Owens” and the below results will be returned.
13. Back to Search Results
Clicking the Back to Search Results button returns the Search Results screen where an additional Application Number may be clicked to view and additional application. The Application Number just viewed will be displayed with a grey band.
When the Search Results screen is displayed after clicking the Back to Search Results button, the original search terms will remain in the search bar where they can be modified if desired. Clicking the Back to Search Results button also will retain the sorting options chosen for the search (as described below under Sort Results).
14. New Search
Clicking the New Search button returns the original Search screen. The search term(s) remain in the search bar where they can be modified if desired.
15. Sort Results by Application Number
The results initially are sorted based on relevancy, but the results may be sorted in ascending and descending order based on Application Number.
Initial Sort Order
Ascending Sort Order
Application Numbers are listed with the lowest on top and ascending in number as you scroll down. Hover mouse over Application # until up arrow appears and click.
The Application Numbers listed on the displayed items per page will be sorted in ascending sort order.
Descending Sort Order
Application Numbers are listed with the highest on top and descending in number as you scroll down. Hover mouse over Application # until down arrow appears and click.
The Application Numbers listed on the displayed items per page will be sorted in descending sort order.
IMPORTANT: Only the items listed will be sorted. For example, if there are 75 applications returned on the search and only 50 are listed on items per page, only 50 will be sorted.
16. Sort Results by Issue Date
The Issue Dates are first displayed by relevancy of the search results, but the applications may be sorted in ascending and descending order based on Issue Date.
Ascending Sort Order
Issue Dates are listed with the earliest on top and ascending in date as you scroll down. Hover mouse over Issue Date until up arrow appears and click.
The Issue Dates listed on the displayed items per page will be sorted in ascending sort order.
Descending Sort Order
Issue Dates are listed with latest on top and descending in date as you scroll down. Hover mouse over Issue Date until down arrow appears and click.
The Application Numbers listed on the displayed items per page will be sorted in descending sort order.
17. Copy and Pasting Text
All documents have undergone optical character recognition (OCR) and the text may be cut and pasted into word processing documents.
To copy and paste, place the cursor at the beginning of the text you wish to copy and drag to include all desired text. Copy the text by using the keyboard copy command, the Browser copy function, or by right clicking and choosing copy.
Paste the text into a word processing program, note taking program, or equivalent program by using the keyboard paste command, the Browser paste function, or by right clicking and choosing paste.
Please note this post is for general informational purposes only. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney client relationship.
